Quotes from Janet Malcolm

If I write a page a day, I feel very good about it.

My scepticism of biography continues even though I keep doing it.

My living room has an oak-wood floor, Persian carpets, floor-to-ceiling bookcases, a large ficus and large fern, a fireplace with a group of photographs and drawings over it, a glass-top coffee table with a bowl of dried pomegranates on it, and sofas and chairs covered in off-white linen.

This is what it is the business of the artist to do. Art is theft, art is armed robbery, art is not pleasing your mother.

Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people's vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse.

Human nature is such that when we are suddenly taken up by someone whom we consider superior and admirable, we accept his attentions calmly, whereas when we are dropped we cannot rest until we feel we have got to the bottom of the person's profound irrationality.

Every journalist who is not too stupid or full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people's vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse.

This is what it is the business of the artist to do. Art is theft, art is armed robbery, art is not pleasing your mother.

The concept of the psychopath is, in fact, an admission of failure to solve the mystery of evil—it is merely a restatement of the mystery—and only offers an escape valve for the frustration felt by psychiatrists, social workers, and police officers, who daily encounter its force.

Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything it is because we are dangerously near to wanting nothing.

What gives journalism its authenticity and vitality is the tension between the subject's blind self absorption and the journalist's skepticism. Journalists who swallow the subject's account whole and publish it are not journalists but publicists.

Life, of course, never gets anyone's entire attention. Death always remains interesting, pulls us, draws us.

Poets and novelists and playwrights make themselves, against terrible resistances, give over what the rest of us keep safely locked within our hearts.

a fundamental rule of journalism, which is to tell a story and stick to it. The narratives of journalism (significantly called "stories"), like those of mythology and folklore, derive their power from their firm, undeviating sympathies and antipathies. Cinderella must remain good and the stepsisters bad. "Second stepsister not so bad after all" is not a good story.

The concept of privacy is a sort of screen to hide the fact that almost none is possible in a social universe.

The freedom to be cruel is one of journalism's uncontested privileges, and the rendering of subjects as if they were characters in bad novels is one of its widely accepted conventions.

In the common perception, there is something unseemly about young people getting rich. Getting rich is supposed to be the reward for hard work, preferably arriving when you are too old to enjoy it. And the spectacle of young millionaires who made their bundle not from business or crime but from avant-garde art is particularly offensive. The avant-garde is supposed to be the conscience of the culture, not its id.

Every amateur harbors the fantasy that his work is only waiting to be discovered; a second fantasy-that the established contemporary artists must also be frauds- is a necessary corollary

What Helen of Troy did in her spare time and what she was 'really like' are not questions that torture us.

Newspaper stories that were originally written to satisfy our daily hunger for idle and impersonal Schadenfreude—to excite and divert and be forgotten the next week—now take their place among serious sources of information and fact, and are treated as if they themselves were not simply raising the question of what happened and who is good and who is bad. I

The voices began to take over the book and to speak to the reader over the biographer's head. They whispered, "Listen to me, not to her. I am authentic. I speak with authority. Go to the full texts of the journals, the letters home, and the rest. They will tell you what you want to know.

Biographers rue the destruction or loss of letters; they might also curse the husband and wife who never leave each other's side, and thus perform a kind of epistolary abortion.

The Olwyn force wins only when the writer bows to its power and puts down his pen.

He never asked me what I thought, and I never told him what I thought, because in my view that's the way a journalist ought to behave. You ought not to be going around to people volunteering your feelings. That's daily journalism.